March 2011

Not long after airstrikes began in Libya earlier this month, certain attorneys at four U.S. law firms, known for having high-profile clients in the oil industry, each received a personally addressed email message.

Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHAS) are being used to transform old texts riddled with smudges, crooked type, and other distortions into searchable files. Optical character recognition…

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security recently released a white paper describing a tripartite approach to cybersecurity based on automation, interoperability, and authentication designed to make networks fundamentally more…

Most data networks could be faster, more energy efficient, and more secure. But network hardware—switches, routers, and other devices—is essentially locked down, meaning network operators can't change the way they function…

An ambitious attempt by Google to shift the Web over to a new, royalty-free video format has taken significant strides. New software has been released that can build the format into dedicated chips for cell phones and other…

Like the visual effects you've been seeing in movies these days? Of course, you already know that in most cases they're computer-generated. And as you've seen over the last few days during my visit to Lucasfilm's Industrial…

The National Security Agency, the top U.S. electronic intelligence service, has joined a probe of the October cyber attack on Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. amid evidence the intrusion by hackers was more severe than first disclosed…

Our flying robot overlords seem to have a fun side after all. In this video, watch two quadrocopters team up to skillfully juggle a ball, thanks to software developed by Sergei Lupashin and colleagues at ETH Zurich. The machines…

Say you're zooming down the highway, when you spot one of those speed-limit enforcement cameras from the corner of your eye. You hit the brakes, but not before the camera's flash catches you breaking the law.

The Web is poised for a comeback. How’s that? Isn’t the Web already the crucial utility of online commerce, information and entertainment? In many ways, it certainly is. The Web’s importance is indisputable—but there are signs…

At 5:20 am EDT on Mar. 29, 2011, Messenger captured this historic image of Mercury, the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the Solar System's innermost planet. Over the subsequent six hours, Messenger acquired…

Frans Kaashoek, a professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and associate director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has won the Association for Computing…

The Multicore Association has established specifications for a programming model designed to make it easier to write software for multicore chips, particularly for those used in smartphones, tablets, and embedded systems.

China is on course to overtake the U.S. in scientific output possibly as soon as 2013—far earlier than expected. That is the conclusion of a major new study by the Royal Society, the U.K.'s national science academy.

A favorite pastime of Internet users is to share their location: services like Google Latitude can inform friends when you are nearby; another, Foursquare, has turned reporting these updates into a game.

European researchers have developed a computer processor and memory chip made from plastic semiconductors. "Compared to using silicon, this has the advantage of lower price and that it can be flexible," says IMEC's Jan Genoe…

The next generation of Apache Hadoop will likely be released this year, says Yahoo!'s Todd Papaioannou. Apache Hadoop enables batch processing of petabytes of data, but it does not effectively manage resources across thousands…

Japan's focus on building humanoid robots that perform tasks that humans can already do, instead of building robots that can go where humans cannot, has made it more difficult to respond to the nuclear disaster that followed…

Far-sighted data policy and cloud computing are leading to the "democratization of satellite mapping," one expert says — and the payoff will be wider access to information about the earth via platforms such as the new Google…

Traditionally, intelligence agencies have relied on top-secret information to track changes in other countries. But wiretaps and secret intercepts didn't help U.S. officials predict the Arab Spring that has brought revolution…